Apple's iOS 10 has arrived. These tips will help you make the most of it.

Kill Unused Apple Apps

The greatest news from iOS 10 is you no longer have to keep the apps that Apple pre-loads on all its iPhones but inevitably end up in a folder marked "crap." Delete them the same way you delete any app you don't want (hold a finger on the icon until they all go wiggly, then click the X that appears in the upper left of the app). You can reinstall them anytime via the App Store.

As Apple outlines on its support page, removing some apps will affect others. Delete the iBooks, Maps, Music, or Podcast apps, for example, and they won't work with CarPlay.

Easy Notification Clearance

This one is loooong overdue: When your notifications are overwhelming, you can clear them all at once—not just per app. However, this works best with an iPhone 6s or higher with 3D Touch—you tap and hold the X at the top, then select "Clear All Notifications." On the older iPhones without 3D Touch, you can still click the X, but you have to then delete items day by day (instead of app by app like in iOS 9). You can also swipe an individual notification left to delete them one by one.

Home App Automates

Apple hasn't given up on taking control of your home automation. The new Home App —which you can delete!—offers to take control of your smart home devices. You can control by room, or just set things up to activate when you get home or leave home, etc. Mine didn't notice any of my installed Nest products, but your mileage may/will vary, as the automation devices have to support HomeKit to be seen by the app.

Sing to the New Control Center

Like before, you access the Control Center—a quick way of using/activating/deactivating various iOS features—by swiping up from the bottom of the screen. It's redesigned slightly for iOS 10 with two pages of controls. The features you're used to are on the first page—Airplane Mode, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Do Not Disturb, volume, AirPlay, AirDrop, Flashlight, Clock, Calculator, and Camera quick access, plus now the Night Shift color shift toggle. But swipe left and you get controls purely for music and audio. If you have any home-automation devices set up in the Home app, swipe left again to access them. You can use 3D Touch to get active access to some, like using it to change the color on smart lightbulbs.

Light Up Your Life With 3D Touch

The flashlight function—using what's supposed to be the camera flash on your iPhone—usually is a simple on/off affair. If you have an iPhone 6s or 7—one with 3D Touch capability—you can change the brightness. In the Control Center, hold your finger on the Flashlight icon to switch between Bright, Medium, and Low light. (Or just do like everyone else and use your front screen as a low-end flashlight when climbing stairs in the dark.)

In fact, if you've got an iPhone with 3D Touch you can use it to get a little something extra out of almost everything in Control Center and beyond. For example, press your finger on the Settings icon. You'll get a quick pop-up menu with access to settings for the Battery, Cellular Data, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. Same goes for the Camera icon in the Control Center: you get to jump instantly to Take Photo, Record Slo-Mo, Record Video, or Take Selfie. Try it on the Wi-Fi icon to pick a network, the Bluetooth icon to pick a device, set the timer to preset times (1 hour, 20 minutes, 5 minutes, or 1 minute), hold Do Not Disturb to change settings, even touch and hold the Calculator icon to copy the last resulting calculation to the clipboard.

Get to Camera Quick

The iPhone camera is pretty great, even if the one on iPhone 7 Plus is NOT sporting a real telephoto lens. Previous versions of iOS made getting to the camera app semi-easy via either Control Center or even just swiping up from the lock screen. In iOS 10 it's even faster—on the lock screen, swipe left anywhere. Instant camera access.

Convert Text to Emoji

If you type a text and write out some words that have an emoji equivalent, Messages will highlight the words you could swap out for an emoji; any word that has an emoji equivalent glows an orangey red. Tap it to pick the emoji you want (for example "smiley" gets four different options).

Get Loud With Messages

If you're using the Messages app and sending to others on iMessage (you'll know because the word balloons are all blue, not green), you have new options to animate what you send. The word balloon on the other end, whether you're sending a text or an image, can be set to Slam, Loud, Gentle, or Invisible Ink (where the user has to "scratch" the message on screen to see what it says). You can set other effects to rock the recipient's entire screen, not just the word balloon—they include fireworks, balloons, confetti, lasers, and a shooting star. Hold the send button to pull up the Effects menu; click Bubble or Screen at top to pick which you want to impact. Recipients without iOS 10 will just get a normal text.

Draw Your Message

Interestingly, you can only get to the Slam/Loud/etc. effects in Messages when the iPhone is in portrait orientation. Turn the device 90 degrees to landscape and you can't access 'em. You do, however, get access to the new full-screen drawing option for hand-writing messages. If it doesn't automatically come up, hit the curly-cue key at bottom right of the keyboard. A few pre-hand-written missives like "Happy birthday" are provided. This is simply black "ink" on white.

Scribble Your Message

Another big change for Messages: quick access to Digital Touch. Click the heart icon now found at the bottom of the Messages app and you get a little drawing screen in the center bottom with a black background (as opposed to the full-screen white-background you get when switch orientation). It comes with different colors to draw with on the left. On the right are a list of gestures—use them to make instant (and to be honest, nonsensical in the context of messages) animations, go full-screen for your art, or pull up video to annotate John Madden-style.

Quick Reply to Messages

Another one for iMessage users only: double tap any incoming message to get the quick-reply pop-up menu for a "tapback." It's like assigning a Facebook like/reaction to messages: pick a heart, thumbs up, thumbs down, "ha ha," double exclamation or a question mark—that icon then shows up on the sender's original message so they know your quick reaction. Non-iMessage users get a text saying something like "Joe liked your message."

Display Video and Images in Messages

Previously, if you shared a link in Messages, the person got the link, that was it. But now, iMessage recipients will get the full image or video (if that's what you're sending) in their messages, ready to view or play back instantly. If the video or image is part of an article, the recipient can just click to read it.

Edit Images in Messages

There have always been a camera icon in messages so you could attach pictures or videos to send, either by taking a new pic or adding from the Photo Gallery. In iOS 10, you can mark up or edit the image. In fact, you can use the new drawing option to start the camera and make a video of yourself or other things, annotating it as you go. The lines can be vectorized—draw a square, it'll turn it into a perfect square; the same goes for lines and circles and ovals. Plus, you can pop in a little magnifier to highlight important parts. Increase the magnifier and even zoom for more detail.

Turn Off iMessage Receipts

WhatsApp could learn from this one: in individual threads/conversations that are entirely iMessage based, click the I in the circle icon at top. If you then check off "Send Read Receipts" the person at the other end will know if you read the message or not. It only works for conversations with individuals, not group iMessage or SMS threads.

Raise to Wake

You used to have to unlock a screen to get notifications. Now you can tell the iPhone to spring to life whenever lifted and have notifications on display. You can set it under Settings > Display and Brightness > Raise to Wake. But it only works in iPhone 6s, SE, or 7—older phones lack the motion coprocessor to make this happen, so you won't see it in settings.

Work Together in Notes

The Notes app has gone from being a boring text-only note-taker to now, as of iOS 10, being a collaborative tool. Use the Share function on a note to add people to it, sending invites via Twitter or email or other methods. If the person you pick also has iOS 10, they can make edits on the note as needed.

Add Apps and Stickers to Messages

In the "why did it take so long?" department: Messages continues to try to one-up Facebook Messenger by adding features like stickers. Among the first is Marvel Stickers, which for $2 gets you a bunch of images of super-heroes to add to messages. You can find those and many, many more by clicking the App Store logo (the A) in Messages and then clicking Store. It's not just stickers, there are other apps like Dubsmash, and games like Words with Friends that you can insert into a message. You can pair apps to Messages and even auto-add them. They all typically install like a separate app, kinda like Bitmoji, but if it's specific to Messages the app will only work under iOS 10.

Access New Emoji

There are 100 new emoji in the default Emoji keyboard that comes with iOS 10. They include a lot of new genders for some old icons, but there are a few overdue options like single parent families and a rainbow flag. Plus there are some new designs. Twitter is mocking Apple for changing the gun emoji to a squirt gun. There are also still a few emoji that are Caucasian-people only, strangely enough—like the Golfer.

BTW, if you send three or fewer emoji in the Messages app with iOS 10, by themselves with no text, they go through at three times the previous size, so they're easier to read.

Sleep Better

Inside the Clock app there is now a Bedtime tab. Set it up with the hours of sleep you wish to get and your mandatory wake time; the app will start a wind-down process for you so you'll know when you should be hitting the hay (aka, not after binge watching three more episodes of Stranger Things.)

Siri Announces Callers

Like a butler, Siri can announce who's calling if you're not close to the iPhone. Go into the Phone Settings and under Announce Calls you can have it happen always, only when you're using headphones, or when you're using CarPlay in a vehicle.

Use Siri for More

With the opening up of Siri to more developers, lots of apps can take advantage of things you say. For example, you can now use Siri directly to send WhatsApp messages, send money via Venmo, leave reviews on Yelp, order an Uber or Lyft car, or talk on Slack. And that's just the start with more to be added, rest assured. Set it up via Settings > Siri > App Support.

Return to the Car

With the huge mix of data coming at an iPhone, it's certainly smart enough to know when you exit a parked car away from home. Apple's using that to track your every move help you find your way back the vehicle. You'll need a connection to your car's Bluetooth or CarPlay stereo to trigger an alert when you get out of your car at a location that's not your home. That should show up in your notifications. (Some iPhone users are having trouble getting it to work, however, mostly on older devices like iPhone 5s.)

Avoid Toll Roads

Another new feature of Apple Maps: it can plot a course that totally avoids highways with tolls on them. Go into Settings > Maps > Driving & Navigation to turn off the tolls.

Type on Apple TV

Using apps on iPhone as a remote is nothing new—check it out for YouTube or Netflix sometime. Apple took it a little further with its own streaming media box running what it now calls tvOS: if you encounter a box that needs to be typed into, say for search, a pop-up appears on your iPhone or iPad that will make it easier to do just that without using the limited Apple TV remote control.

Transcribe Voicemails

Ever had a voicemail you wanted to write down (or just avoid listening to)? Let iOS 10 do it. You don't have to do anything; the transcription should just show up. After you have the text, share it (click and hold then drag the selection bars to get just what you want to send), create a calendar event based on dates or times mentioned in the transcript, even send feedback to Apple regarding bad transcripts so they can try to make it better in the future. Just don't forward anything you shouldn't share.

Go Multilingual on the Fly

Previously, you could only pick one language to use on your iOS keyboard. Now you can go into Settings > General > Dictionary and select multiple languages; then go into Keyboards > Add New Keyboard to add it. From then on, the autocorrect and text prediction features will take all the languages into account as you type. You can switch directly to the other language by tapping the Globe icon, just like you do to access emoji or any third-party keyboard.

Unsub From Mailing Lists

In the Apple Mail app, if you get a message from what's obviously a mailing list with an Unsubscribe option (typically hidden at the bottom), the Mail app will provide a pop-up that offers to unsubscribe you automatically, by sending a message on your behalf to make that happen.

Delete Unlistened to Music Auto-Magically

It's possible you have not subscribed to a streaming music service like Apple Music or Spotify because you buy your music, thank you very much. We get it. You want to own your tunes. What happens if you don't have a lot of storage space on iPhone to store those songs for listening? iOS 10 has a new solution called Optimize Storage. You'll find it under Settings > Music. There, you can set up a maximum amount of storage for music transferred from iTunes: 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, or 32GB (maybe more if you have a phone with more than 64GB capacity). That's enough for roughly 800, 1,600, 3,200, or 6,400 songs, respectively. If you move new songs to the iPhones, any tunes that haven't been played for a long time get automatically deleted off the phone. But they should still be in your iTunes.

Disable Press Home to Open

In iOS 10, older iPhones that you used to just unlock by putting a finger on the Touch ID now require a full push of the Home button. It even says "Press Home to Open" on the screen, despite your fingerprint doing the hard security work. For some this will seem like a bug—but it's a feature, and one you can disable. If you don't want that extra step, go to Settings > General > Accessibility > Home Button and toggle "Rest Finger to Open." Then the Home button will go back to "normal."

Multi-Device Cut and Paste

As long as the devices are from Apple and run iOS or macOS, this will work: sign into all of them with the same Apple ID and what you cut/copy on one will be available to paste on another via the "universal clipboard."

Related Galleries

About the Author

Eric narrowly averted a career in food service when he began in tech publishing at Ziff-Davis over 20 years ago. He was on the founding staff of Windows Sources, FamilyPC, and Access Internet Magazine (all defunct, and it's not his fault). He's the author of two novels, BETA TEST ("an unusually lighthearted apocalyptic tale"--Publishers' Weekly) and KALI: THE GHOSTING OF SEPULCHER BAY. He works from his home in Ithaca, NY. See Full Bio